Author Topic: Fire controls assignement  (Read 3334 times)

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Offline vorpal+5 (OP)

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Fire controls assignement
« on: November 28, 2017, 06:08:28 AM »
Hi,

I'm humbling questioning the interest to micro-manage that. That's a big part of the time used in combat or before it, for not a lot of interest in my opinion. Why not just having a ship being able to fire on a target do so, if there is a non committed FC that has the range to the enemy?
And when you do fire, the used FC choice is rather simple, that's the FC (of the proper type, beam or missile) which has the lowest range while still being at range. I don't see there is much subtlety here.

Plus added bonus, a FC in VB6 Aurora can switch target in fly for each volley of missile I believe. i.e you fire away, then when launchers are reloaded, nothing prevent you from picking another target? Realistically, if the first volley is still in flight, then it should still be busy piloting the volley.

With my proposal, the FC being still committed, you could not fire again, or perhaps only of the current target. But not a brand new one.

I might be missing subtleties, I don't know much Aurora in the end, but currently I don't see much point in having to assign FC manually. It takes time and it's boring. I do love micro management, but not for the sake of it. I'm very pleased to see the extra MM on fuel in C# Aurora e.g  ;D
 

Iranon

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Re: Fire controls assignement
« Reply #1 on: November 28, 2017, 06:27:51 AM »
That may often not be what the player wants, you may want to fire selectively.

Only Microwaves to prepare the target for boarding instead of destroying it.

You may want to keep point defence weapons in reserve while engaged in beam combat... rare now, but may become more common when point-blank missiles will be elegible for interception in the upcoming version.
(Don't like that change, imo that unintended feature is both interesting and justifiable).

Maybe you want to split fire between several targets; again often a consideration when Microwaves are involved (suppress one target at a time and switch, while regular weapons destroy something else).

And so on.
 

Offline vorpal+5 (OP)

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Re: Fire controls assignement
« Reply #2 on: November 28, 2017, 07:11:16 AM »
I don't see how you could not do that with the alternate proposal? If you want to fire some microwaves, then select your target, the microwaves and fire. You can fire if there is a non-busy fire control that is in range.

Admittedly, you might want to keep assigned PD with FC in reserve. But this can be an option. A FC can be either reserved to a particular group of weapons, exactly like now, or is 'free to use', by any valid group of weapons in need of it.
 

Offline bean

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Re: Fire controls assignement
« Reply #3 on: November 28, 2017, 07:37:01 AM »
The problem is that this would require a complete revision of the way weapon/target allocation is handled.  Currently, there are links between the weapon and the FC, and the FC and the target.  There's no direct weapon-target link, and this would require adding that, and then including a way for weapons to pull FC onto the target.  In practice, I almost never adjust my FC allocations once I've got them set up. 
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Offline Barkhorn

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Re: Fire controls assignement
« Reply #4 on: November 28, 2017, 10:53:42 AM »
I could've sworn there was a checkbox to make fire controls automatically target and fire on enemy contacts within range.
 

Offline vorpal+5 (OP)

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Re: Fire controls assignement
« Reply #5 on: November 28, 2017, 03:30:26 PM »
Well Byron, I'm not implying that this is not added work for Steve, but if the proposal has no drawbacks given that Steve is extensively redesigning a lot of things in C# Aurora, perhaps there is something to dig here...

This was just a suggestion anyway. I was curious if there was something I was missing.
 

Offline Father Tim

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Re: Fire controls assignement
« Reply #6 on: November 29, 2017, 04:23:23 PM »
I could've sworn there was a checkbox to make fire controls automatically target and fire on enemy contacts within range.

There is.  Don't use it.  The 'Auto Assign' button was set up to copy the way NPR / Precursor ships functioned, and it never really worked properly.  I don't think it called all the same code as NPRs, so it hasn't been updated as much. . . if at all.  It absolutely doesn't shoot 'smart'.  It also completely overwrites anything you might have set up on the ships in question, so you can forget about Point Defense from anything but CIWS.

You can save weapon/FC assignments, and copy them to all ships in the same class, so it really shouldn't take more than a couple minutes to set up your fleet. . . unless you're Waresky and building billion-ton ships with hundreds of fire comtrols and twelve thousand weapons.
« Last Edit: December 13, 2017, 03:53:43 PM by Father Tim »
 

Offline Whitecold

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Re: Fire controls assignement
« Reply #7 on: November 29, 2017, 04:58:48 PM »
There is.  Don't use it.  The 'Auto Assign' button was set up to copy the way NPR / Precursor ships functioned, and it never really worked properly.  I don't think it called all the same code as NPRs, so it hasn't been updated as much. . . if at all.  It absolutely doesn't shoot 'smart'.  It also completely overwrites anything you might have set up on the ships in question, so you can forget about Point Defense from anything but CIWS.

You can save weapon/FC assignments, and copy them to all ships in the same class, so it really shouldn't take more than a couple minutes to set up your fleet. . . unless your Waresky and building billion-ton ships with hundreds of fire comtrols and twelve thousand weapons.

I hope there will be a overhaul of the combat interface.
I'd imagine a system where each fire control has a fire queue instead of a single target. It will always fire on the highest priority target assuming it is in range and is eligible. Possible criteria to make it ineligible could be number of missiles already targeting the unit, or number of fire controls already having picked this target.
Now the interesting part would be that you could create fire control channels for a fleet unit, and physical fire controls can put those channels into their queues. If such a channel is #1 priority, it will overtake the target of the parent channel (which could again inherit from another channel)

Thus you can assign targets to your entire fleet, and retain control, changing target priorities for individual squadrons as needed.
AMM behaviors would also be a target option that can be put in a queue, in that way you can also switch missile defense behaviors as well for your entire fleet with one click.
 

Offline obsidian_green

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Re: Fire controls assignement
« Reply #8 on: November 29, 2017, 06:29:51 PM »
There is.  Don't use it.  The 'Auto Assign' button was set up to copy the way NPR / Precursor ships functioned, and it never really worked properly.

Good advice in general, but there's a niche use for auto-assigning targets if the weapons platform has only <I>one</I> fire control. I set my interceptors to auto-assignment so that a squadron can just be given the movement order to a target and they take care of the rest. I don't know if that effects their point-defense setup, when I experimented with auto-assigning of targets for multi-FC ships I only noticed screwed up/inappropriate matches between weapons and FCs and don't recall if it changed my PD settings---I haven't used the interceptors in PD where they got the chance to fire (Gauss turrets took out everything in one instance, all interceptors on sortie in others).